9 November
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
Firefox's default tracking protection
Firefox on your desktop by default lets a cookie (a small file a website stores in your browser) be used only on the site that created it. Mozilla's June 2022 announcement said this default applies to all Firefox desktop users worldwide and stops tracking companies from following your browsing across sites, and it was still set that way in Firefox's development source code when we checked on 8 November 2026. On 9 November 2004, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0, available in Japanese the same day according to Japan's Internet Watch, and its press release listed a built-in pop-up blocker and a clear display of secure sites' real identity to help guard against phishing and spoofed sites. In mainland China, the Chinese news site IT之家 and CyberInsider reported in July 2025 that Beijing Firefox (北京谋智火狐信息技术有限公司), Firefox's local operator, would end its account, sync and community services later that year, though the browser could still be downloaded from firefox.com. If you use Firefox and have not changed the cookie setting, you do not need to turn anything on, and on other browsers you can look for an option to block tracking cookies.
Also on this day
- TechCrunch, citing multiple reports, wrote that China had blocked Gmail, Google Maps and many other Google services, which most observers assumed was linked to the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Party Congress that had opened the day before. An update the next day cited GreatFire as saying the blocking of Google Search may have lasted only about 12 hours. Source: TechCrunch